"Cartographies of the identity" by Fabio Restrepo Hernández

Description of the project by Ediciones Uniandes

An architect makes stripes with his pencil on the blank sheet, the peasant traces grooves with his plow on the ground to cultivate, the painter with his brush leaves traces on the canvas, while the writer draws tiny fragments of dark lines on the surface of the paper. The line is the gesture that unifies all these practices and is the subject of investigation of the present work.
 
The architectural project makes the place livable, it is the art of inhabiting the land. As a construction, architecture occupies a place. The occupied place is determined by the relations established between it and the constructed object.

These relationships are expressed verbally with the prepositions "about", "between", "under", "before"; and are graphically expressed with the drawing, that is, by drawing lines on the white surface of a paper. In The Thoughts of an Architect, John Hejduk talks about the craft and defines it as drawing lines. And he adds in number five: "the mine of the pencil of an architect disappears (drawn) metamorphoses". The specifics of the architectural practice - though not exclusively of it - would be in this tracing the line that draws.
 
Only when the first line is drawn does the world become visible to the eyes of man. The rock paintings and parietales are previous to the world and cradle of its perception. Line, boundary and distance constitute the body of mapping identity, following the recommendations of Henri Matisse who insisted that "we must always follow the desire of the line."